Three-quarters of a million vehicles are 'disappearing' from Britain's roads every year, being stolen for scrap and illegal export or transferred onto false numberplates.
Andy Latham, chair of the Vehicle Recyclers Association, told Autocar that large numbers of cars effectively vanish once they move through certain areas of the motor trade.
"We recently completed a Freedom of Information request to the DVLA which found that between 650,000 and 841,000 vehicles are potentially unaccounted for each year," he said.
Latham claimed that while some vehicles are being legally registered as off the road, a large number are thought to be stolen and then illegally scrapped or exported without documentation.
"A lack of visibility and enforcement in this area makes it easier for criminals to illegally dismantle vehicles and ship components and tyres abroad in containers," he said. "Equally, we see parts from unlicensed vehicle dismantlers being sold on online marketplaces."
Latham believes the trade has been exacerbated by unlicensed dismantlers, which he estimates to number more than 1000. He said: "They make UK roads less safe and push insurance premiums up for everyone."
As Latham highlighted, a vehicle must not be exported without the DVLA being notified and end-of-life vehicles must be issued with a Certificate of Destruction or Notification of Destruction by an authorised treatment facility.
Meanwhile, cloned and ghost (made-up) numberplates are being deployed by criminals to shield the identity of stolen vehicles and to cheat the UK's network of automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras.
Of the 100 million numberplates that ANPR cameras read daily, "1% to 2% produce unreadable or incomplete reads", said Matt Willmot, head of Operation Topaz, a joint initiative between the National Police Chiefs' Council, the Department for Transport (DfT) and the Home Office, and "a proportion of those are a deliberate attempt to conceal the identity of the vehicle".
The Motor Insurers' Bureau (MIB) said cloned and ghost plates are linked to offences including "rogue trading, drug dealing and organised crime" while also allowing drivers to avoid paying congestion charges, fines and insurance checks.
Martin Saunders, the MIB's head of uninsured driving prevention, said: "Numberplates are, simply put, the window to vehicle identification. The increasing damage done by drivers of vehicles hiding in plain sight on our road system should not be tolerated."
One driver affected by the problem is Louise Fletcher, a heart failure nurse from Worthing, West Sussex (pictured below).
